However, Gus retaliates by saying “if you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d let you go to that aviation school.” These “ifs” dismisses Bigger’s dream as a merely unattainable goal. Black people are forced to live there because they cannot afford to rent or buy any other home, or the white landlords are not willing to rent it out to a black person.
(1940).

In fact, Bigger’s entire adult life was defined by the pull he felt between acts of deviance and acts of convention. Wright’s narrative depicts the psychological and existential struggle of adolescent, black youth to feel any sense of agency in life because the institution of racial oppression impinges upon their psychological development; consequently, a strong-willed, black man may prove incapable of accepting a reality devoid of agency and dangerously struggle to create agency where there is none.According to Dobie, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory differed from Freudian theory most significantly in that “Freud’s concept of the unconscious as a force that determines our actions and beliefs shook the long-held ideal that we are beings who can control our own destinies” while Lacan asserted that the unconscious was not some peripheral force acting upon the conscious self but, rather, the core of the self—“the nucleus of our being” (Dobie 69).
This is due to the ignorant blindness of American society. Being strong-willed becomes a tragic flaw because it keeps him from assimilating the way those around him do. Bigger uses his long experience with racial prejudice shrewdly, manipulating the prejudices of his white questioners. Robert Butler refers to the text “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” when he describes, “Bigger was modeled in certain ways on five black men from [Wright’s] childhood and adolescence in Mississippi who were rebellious lawbreakers whom he both admired and feared.

In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, the theme of blindness recurs a multitude of times, and all definitions of blindness apply at least once within the book.

In Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, a young black man named Bigger is faced with constant fear from oppressive societal tendencies, yet is inclined to define himself by his actions in order to find identity. Wright writes, “To those who wanted to kill him he was not human, not included in that picture of Creation; and that was why he had killed it. 0000001626 00000 n $� � )���R��aa`���u`� Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Forced to share a small one-room apartment in the “Black Belt” with his mother, brother and sister, Bigger felt trapped most of his life with the knowledge that “they keep us bottled up here like wild animals” (Wright 249).

Her short-comings also shed light upon the difficulty of overcoming racial obstacles in the 1930’s.

Instead of blaming society for his transgressions, Bigger says that he is what he kills for, defining himself by actions that most people would be ashamed of. Wright was looking for an outlet from the suffering imposed on him by society. On a figurative level, there are both positive and negative facets of blindness.

Through the estrangement of Bigger Thomas, many of the values and morals of the culture in which he lived are brought to light.Immediately in this novel the revealing of these societal assumptions takes place.”Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Bigger decides to disregard what others think, separating himself from society by fully accepting his actions and their significance: “He had done this. (Wright 31) Everyone calmly weighs his options in the excerpt above while Bigger’s anxiety level steadily rises in response to his own thoughts.Bigger’s unique struggle stems from his being such an inordinately strong-willed individual. Here we see the potential that religion had to serve as a saving force in Bigger’s life, if only it had been more accessible to him.

When taking that definition to a figurative level, it means to fail to see through the perspectives of other people, or it can also mean to overanalyze and fail to see the true form of a situation. Its effects threatened from the outside world and were imbued within the farthest-reaching corners of his soul.

(31)Externally, Bigger’s intense fear of life’s certainty—and his own inability to do anything about it—translated directly into his characteristic anger and rage.


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